Fall Convocation Address

September 9, 2021

Convocation is being called together, and this year is convocation cubed.  We are called back to school in the customary fashion, after summer break.  We are also called together in person, after COVID forced us to keep our distance for such a long time.  And we are called together as a community after a year of difficult institutional soul searching.

Who is the “we” that is back together and what is it that sustains our union?  Our community persists over time, yet it is always in flux.  Each year we welcome new members – students, faculty, and staff – as we are doing here today.  And, each year, we congratulate other members on their graduation, or their retirement, and we bid farewell to those who pass away.  Given enough time, none of the individuals remain.  Everyone who was here in 1870 – when the institution became Washington and Lee University -- is gone, as we will be one day.  But if all of the constituent parts change – like the cells that make up our bodies – how can the whole maintain its existence?  What accounts for the identity of a person, or an institution, or a nation?

If those questions intrigue you, run to the philosophy department.  You will find, I suspect, that philosophers are better at posing good questions than arriving at conclusive answers.  I am no exception.  But let me indulge in some provisional thoughts.

Community is sustained, I propose, by the continuity of shared purposes and principles.  Our common intentions and values, the actions they inspire, and the shared memories created by those deeds, bind us together. 

I love the clarity with which we express our purpose and our principles at W&L.  We have a mission, and we state it explicitly: “Washington and Lee University provides a liberal arts education that develops students’ capacity to think freely, critically, and humanely, and to conduct themselves with honor, integrity, and civility.  Graduates will be prepared for lifelong learning, personal achievement, responsible leadership, service to others, and engaged citizenship in a global and diverse society.”

There is a lot packed into those two sentences.  Enough that I teach a whole seminar devoted to their interpretation.  These powerful words, which function as our institutional North Star, manifest themselves in a variety of ways.

They are the focal point of our strategic plan.  Each of its initiatives aims to advance our mission and contribute to making this university an even better version of itself.  We are making steady progress toward becoming need-blind in admissions, which will enable us to admit the most compelling students without regard for family financial circumstances.  We are working to recruit and retain an exceptionally talented and increasingly diverse faculty and staff.  We are enhancing our curriculum – with new minors in Law, Justice and Society, Entrepreneurship, and Data Science; a new legal clinic in Civil Rights and Racial Justice; the creation of the DeLaney Center; and the review of our General Education requirements.  We are updating our facilities – with the Duchossois Athletic Center, the Harte Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Center for Inclusion and Engagement.  We are striving to serve the public good, with our work in Community Based Learning, Institutional History, and Sustainability.  All of these efforts realize our mission a bit more fully in the world.

Our purposes and principles are also evident in the lives of our alumni.  The ultimate measure of a liberal arts education is the impact it has on the paths taken by its students over the course of their lifetimes.  Aristotle emphasized that a life cannot be properly judged until it is complete.  Each year we lose some of our alumni, and this year the extraordinary life of Roger Mudd, class of 1950, came to its conclusion.

Roger Mudd was a legendary broadcast journalist known for his penetrating questions, which he attributed to his training as a history major.  When he asked Ted Kennedy the disarmingly simple question – “why do you want to be president?” -- Kennedy’s failure to offer a coherent answer sank his presidential campaign.  Mudd won five Emmy Awards and was known to his contemporaries for his commitment to the truth.  Susan Zirinsky, former President of CBS News, described Mudd as a journalist of enormous integrity and character, who would not budge if he believed he was right and would not compromise his ethical standards.  Mudd credited the Honor System with having an indelible imprint on him and with sustaining his connection and commitment to the university.  His enduring legacy at W&L includes the creation of the Mudd Center for Ethics.

This year’s Mudd Center theme – Daily Ethics:  How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World – reflects a third way in which our purposes and principles make themselves manifest.  Aristotle contended that we are what we repeatedly do.  Our habitual behavior reveals who we are.  Friendship and community provide opportunities for shared activity that are pleasurable and help us to improve our habits and become better people.

The profound moral significance of the ways that we go about our ordinary business is a central theme in 19th century Russian fiction.  I confess that I find these stories – by the likes of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov – to be an acquired taste.  Which I regard as my shortcoming, rather than theirs.  I further confess that I am no literary critic.  But I am a lifelong learner, so I was especially excited recently to read a new book by George Saunders – one of my favorite contemporary short story writers – entitled, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:  In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

Saunders teaches fiction writing at Syracuse University, and this book derives from a course he regularly offers there.  The first thing I love about the book is that Saunders gives me permission not to fall for these Russian masters at first sight.  My reactions to their classic stories are exactly like those of his graduate students – “Why the endless physical descriptions of every living thing within a two-mile radius?” – “It’s so slow.  Does Turgenev really have to tell us everything about everyone?”  I mean, does he, really? 

But the second thing I love about the book is that Saunders proceeds to make the case that even exceedingly careful description, done well, is a virtue.  And he gives an account of what it means to write short stories well.  The primary, unbreakable rule is to respect your reader by treating her as an intelligent interlocutor whose ongoing engagement with your writing must be earned.  Continually ask yourself, why would the reader want to keep reading?  If we are honest with ourselves, this is no easy task.  But if you succeed in holding your reader’s attention, you have the opportunity to invite her to see some feature of the world – a character, a place, a way of life – from a variety of angles, and in so doing to mitigate our tendency to judge things too quickly, on the basis of limited information and partial perspectives.  Saunders regards the resulting improvement as not only intellectual but also moral: “The more I know about [a person], the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment.  Some essential mercy in me has been switched on” (159).  Compassion, he argues, emerges from getting to know people well enough that we realize we have more in common than sets us apart.

This trait was exemplified by another distinguished alumnus who passed away this year, Senator John Warner, class of 1947.  He was a Korean War veteran who attended W&L on the GI Bill, represented Virginia in the Senate for five terms, and also served as the Secretary of the Navy and a trustee of the university.  At Warner’s funeral service, President Biden said that “[John] understood that empathy – empathy – is the fuel of democracy, the willingness to see each other as opponents, not as enemies.  Above all, to see each other as fellow Americans even when we disagree.  From John’s perspective, especially when we disagree. 

Saunders’ point is that cultivating the habit of paying close attention to each other – the lived analogy of acquiring the literary taste for exceedingly careful description – is nothing short of morally transformative.  He has identified a deep connection between our core value of thinking humanely and our core values of thinking freely and critically.  In a recent New Yorker interview entitled “Questions of Justice,” he says that “the job of a short story [might be] to … ask certain questions and decline to answer them, buttressing both sides so that the questions become more complex.  The reader is put in the position of being rebuffed when she tries to come to some neat moral conclusion.”  His job as a short story writer, he says, is to try to keep loving all of his characters, by continuing to see some part of himself even in the ones who do irrational or evil things.  He likes to imagine that, if he pulls it off, he might create a way of looking at the world that leads the reader to think, “we’re all in this together.”

What Saunders has to say about good writing and reading applies generally to good teaching and learning.  Intellectual virtues and virtues of character are intertwined.  Our intellectual habits – the ways we form judgments and reach conclusions – have moral implications.  We do injustice when we fail to see people or things in their fullness.  We become more just when we train our minds to perceive and appreciate complexity, when we hone our capacities for patient observation, drawing fine distinctions, asking fundamental questions, developing careful interpretations, proposing well-justified explanations, and engaging in robust, respectful disagreement with those who see things differently.

Such mental and moral development take place in every discipline:  Accounting and Africana Studies; Chemistry and Classics; Dance and Data Science; English and Engineering; Geology and German; Japanese and Journalism; Latin and Law; Math and Music; Philosophy and Physics; Religion and Russian.

What you study is much less important than how you go about studying.  Liberal arts education – done well – increases our intellectual capabilities and makes us better people at the same time.  Better people make better leaders and better citizens.  That is the promise of our mission statement.  Our shared belief in that promise, and our daily devotion to it, form the core of our communal identity.  What we do here every day makes a difference.  Going to class, teaching class.  Going to practice or rehearsal, coaching practice or directing rehearsal.  Greeting each other, taking an interest in each other, getting to know each other, trusting each other.  Sharing the joy of intellectual wonder and lifelong learning.

It’s why we’re here.  It’s why I love this place.  And with the Fall Term officially underway, I’m excited to get back at it.

To help us bring this evening’s program to conclusion, the University Singers will perform the Washington and Lee Hymn.